Among their poets, Homer and Hesiod held a special place in the education of Greek speakers about the past and about the gods, if we take seriously the following statement from Herodotus. Unlike almost all classical scholars, including that happy club who do now take Herodotus seriously, let us entertain its implications at face value:
‘But whence each of these gods came into existence, or whether they were for ever, and what kind of shape they had were not known until the day before yesterday, if I may use the expression; for I believe that Homer and Hesiod were four hundred years before my time—and no more than that. It is they who created for the Greeks their theogony; it is they who gave to the gods the special names for their descent from their ancestors and divided among them their honors, their arts, and their shapes. Those who are spoken of as poets before Homer and Hesiod were, in my opinion, later born. The first part of this that I have said is what the priestesses at Dodona say, but the latter, as concerns Homer and Hesiod, is my own statement.’ (2.53, trans. David Grene)
Note what Herodotus is claiming about the relation of epic poetry to practices contemporaneous to him—almost the sum of what we should call ‘Greek religion’. If Herodotus is right, these later practices were constructed, or remade after some catastrophic cultural break, based on cues taken from the epic texts. Evidently, however, these practices were not continuations of the rituals actually depicted in Homer, or else the ‘cultural memory’ would credit Homer and Hesiod merely with being scene painters, not originators. At least some of classical Greece’s new religious rites were based on the names, honours, arts and shapes—the raw material of ritual—derived from the figures and events described in the works of the two epic poets.
It would seem that the development of Greek religion in relation to epic texts paralleled the later development of Christian ritual in relation to Scripture. There is no reason to suppose that Homer told his story with any view toward inspiring religious practices. There is a certain inscrutability to the sacramental imagination; no one could have predicted beforehand that the line, ‘Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed,’ would come into ritual prominence in a Christian rite. It is an episodic highlight, at best, in relation to a gospel text with a much grander storyline. We can say a number of things in the aftermath—that the centurion’s words strongly suggest a Gentile origin for their ritual use, self-consciously Gentile in preparation for what was first perceived to be an Hebrew communion.
There must have been a similarly local reason for the heroising and divinising of Helen in Hellenic Argos as a goddess of sexual health and fertility. We can also probably understand a subsequent desire not to cast her as a villainess. But obviously we will never know if Helen was ever at Troy, or if, as Herodotus claims, Homer only told that version because it made for better poetry. Note the combination of claims we are drawing here from Herodotus: that Homer taught the Greeks about their gods, and that his aim above all was to produce the most compelling poetry. The aesthetic aim cannot be distinguished here from the truth-telling; nor the poetic prowess from the religious authority. If Homer had not been such a damn good poet, such a craftsman of verse and artist at storytelling and expresser of thought, no one would have listened to him for the truth about the gods.
Oral theory fits into a general anthropological mindset, where the Homeric poems become a cultural artefact absurdly imbued with an interest in themselves inculcating traditional values and behaviour. It is stupefying how directly the positing of this conservative interest in Homer must ignore the direct witness of great Greek authors, the most articulate spokesmen for the classical Greek legacy. Homer and Hesiod are said to be responsible for all Greek speakers’ knowledge of the gods, not just the proper names which Greeks used for them but for the ways in which they are honoured (τιμάς), and for first pointing out, to what must have been an uprooted blank slate of a population, the gods’ forms or appearances (εἴδεα). It would seem that these two poets and their poems preceded, and to some extent defined the cultural legacy we study after the fact as ‘Greek religion’. Thus in Herodotus’ view, for Greek speakers, Homer and Hesiod could not have been traditionalists but were innovators, founders and revolutionaries, who gave them new nominal objects and subjects (ὀνόματα) through which they began to express their conceptions and observances, in place of whatever pre-Greek or non-epic religious understanding they might have severally inherited. It is highly presumptuous, therefore, to see Homer and Hesiod as products and exemplars, rather than producers, of culture, whether Indo-European or Hellenic.
The reality on the ground, as it were, is that Homer’s storytelling caused plenty of reaction and anxiety about the effects of his world-view on people’s conduct and behaviour, in particular for his peculiar depiction of the divine, behind-the-scenes governance of human martial and political aspirations, actions and events. The suggestion that some or all of Homer’s usage reflects the transmission of traditional phraseology, seems irrelevant and even counter-intuitive to anyone attempting, for whatever reason, to draw up the principles of a theology based on the radical fluidity of Homer’s presentation of motive and consequence. What role can traditional language be asked to play in presenting an unprecedented and unique new vision of the celestial drama?
None afflicted with the anthropological mentality can have any notion of what Plato actually faced when he tackled the problem, as a thing to overcome in the Republic, of a citizenry exposed from birth to Homer’s education in the ways of gods and men. One critic sympathetic to anthropology describes his experience thus:
I have lived with these Homeric heroes so long that I have come to think of them the way an ethnographer thinks of his tribe: as “my people”; and I find much wisdom among them.1
One suspects, however, that he would not last five minutes with these people.
But in saying that Homer and Hesiod taught the Greeks the names of the gods and their personae and natures, Herodotus is not saying that they made them up, either the names or the gods. That would fly in the face of something quite programmatic in Herodotus, a demonstration through his history that in the world he travelled, people by and large knew and worshipped the same gods, with interesting but local exceptions. It was the names and the rituals that were different. The gods and other ‘mythic’ elements of ancient poetry are not simply fictions in a poetic world, like the creations of Tolkien. Homer did not make up the idea, for example, that the goddess of love was married to the smith god, who was cuckolded by the war god. This is an Indo-European motif. The story gets told in the Odyssey about how Hephaestus traps Ares and Aphrodite in bed, but if Athena is a sort of double of Hephaestus, an analogous collocation happens in Iliad XXI, where Athena defeats Ares and Aphrodite and they end up horizontal together—albeit not in bed this time, but stretched out upon the bounteous earth (426). (I should note that in the Iliad, Hephaestus appears not to be married to Aphrodite, but to beautiful Charis of the shining veil. Athena is of course the Virgin [parthenon].) The work of Georges Dumézil collects the great wealth of common Indo-European material which Homer did not ‘make up’.
Apart from the comparative evidence, however, I wish to share with you a feeling of mine that I do not know how to objectify. You may also feel this with me if you compare the works of Tolkien to those of Homer. Homer is not creating the gods, like characters in a sitcom or a fantasy adventure. He is trying to get them right. That is to say, he is trying to capture them as they most truly and characteristically are, in the way of a portrait painter and his subject, or a landscape artist and a mountain. The style is sometimes realist, sometimes impressionist, sometimes abstract and surreal.
One piece in Homer’s poetic arsenal is the technique of personification, embodying abstractions. One of the most striking examples is Eris, ‘Strife,’ who ‘at first raises her crest but a little, but afterwards,/she plants her head in the heaven and strides upon the earth.’
ἥ τ᾽ ὀλίγη μὲν πρῶτα κορύσσεται, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
οὐρανῷ ἐστήριξε κάρη καὶ ἐπὶ χθονὶ βαίνει: (IV. 442-3)
How does one respond imaginatively to this massive erection? What indeed is it about strife that calls forth this swelling, climactic embodiment? In the opening lines of the poem strife is instead embodied as a human pair in the grammatical dual number, Atreides (Agamemnon) and Achilles. Is the substance of strife differently understood in the singular, cresting, feminine form? Easier for me to conceptualise are the Λιταί, the Prayers that are said to be daughters of Zeus, lame, wrinkled, eyes askance, who follow carefully in the wake of blindness and ruin (IX.502-4). Phoenix invokes them in his plea to Achilles to forgive Agamemnon.
But the Olympian gods are not abstractions or personifications. They are simply persons. They have traits and characters that distinguish them and make them recognisable. Who are they? An answer that is not often heard today, but which is a commonplace in the context of ancient science and religion, is that these names of the gods refer to the planets. On the shield of Achilles, there are the sun, moon and stars, and Homer lists a number of the constellations still visible today. It would be strange if someone intent on representing the heavens had left out the planets. Unless of course the gods, who do appear as actors on the shield, are the planets. It is understood that the ancient religion was ‘astral’, and that the planets were universally feared and venerated, but it is common now for references not to be taken, as on the shield. In the Christian prayer, for example, that begins ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’, few who say or hear it register that it is saying ‘Our Father in οὐρανός’, that is, ‘our father who is in the sky’. I suppose the internalising of Christian faith makes this an unusual translation. Jesus has a lot to say about the ‘Kingdom of the Sky’; this could not exist anywhere, except directly over one’s head.
It is not always easy, aside from the obvious cases like Ares and Zeus (Mars and Jupiter), to tell which planet corresponds to which god. This in itself bespeaks a strange tale: that perhaps the current heavens are not what they used to be. The word ‘planet’, after all, is Greek for ‘wanderer’, and this is one thing that the planets do not do nowadays. They stay on course. Plato in the Timaeus reports that shifts in the planetary courses produce cataclysms and catastrophes on the earth. (Shakespeare also refers to this notion as a high piece of political symbolism.) Given the roles of the gods in the poem, the time of the Iliad must have been a highly active one in the planetary realm. Aside from the severities of wind and rain, there are some truly bizarre atmospheric events reported; consider XI.54: Zeus sends dew dripping with blood, because of the many heads that were to be sent to Hades on that day. In Book XX there is the abortive Götterdämmerung, where all the gods chuff up and almost join in battle; Poseidon so shook the earth that the roots of Mount Ida trembled, and Aidoneus the lord of the shades leapt from his throne in fear that his dank realm would be exposed to mortals and immortals alike. The earth and cosmos are in catastrophe, the separate realms are being confounded, and the basement of the structure is in danger of being exposed.
The sense here is not a romantic projection nor an exaggeration to heighten the depiction of battle. The latter in particular would be completely unnecessary. It is rather the case that this Trojan war took place in extraordinary and catastrophic times. Sometimes the cosmic interventions appeared to favour one side; sometimes the other. For long stretches it appeared that the gods had lost interest in the fray. Zeus aloof on his peak is mirrored in Achilles aloof, self-exiled in his hut. In a vastly different context, the ‘passing over’ of a cosmic body, resulting in a selective destruction, led the followers of Moses to think that they were ‘chosen’. In the Greek context, unlike some others, to be chosen by the gods almost invariably means being marked off, like Oedipus, for an exemplary doom.
As I have discussed elsewhere, Zeus challenges the other gods to ‘try it out for themselves’. If all the gods and goddesses were to hang a golden chain from heaven, and pull, still they could not drag Zeus to the ground. Whereas if he ever felt like it, he says, he could drag the lot of them, together with the earth herself and the sea, and bind them all to a peak of Olympus just hanging there in mid-air. (This chain of the gods motif appears to be world-wide; it can be connected to Hindu temples and totem poles.) The thing is a threat, and Zeus backs off with a smile. Homer seems to like this affect, of taking us to the brink, as in the Götterdämmerung scene, where the underlying structures of the world are in danger of being exposed and possibly thrown into disorder. I would like to point out that modern science teaches something far more fantastic than this image of the golden chain: gravity is an invisible rope that is supposed to act both instantaneously and at a distance. There is nothing truly miraculous like this in Homer’s story-telling.
The question of agency in the planets, despite their being apparently benign and regular these days, is of course still current. The Magi followed a star, as if to say that the revelation of the Christ was written in the cosmos: there was no need to have been raised within the scripture of the Hebrews to recognise it. Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer before the U.S. military bombed Libya. But there must have once been something apparently purposive and unpredictable about the planetary movements, to have inspired both Homeric poetry and the religion of public sacrifice that dominated the world, Hellenic and barbarian, that Herodotus knew. St. Augustine made fun of a religion that worshipped these inconspicuous planets decorating the heavenly ceiling. No wonder; they were not really planets any more.
Hence the gods are cosmic agencies. They are anthropomorphised, not personified. Perhaps the poetry manages to humanise somewhat the otherwise terrifying material forces that threatened the very stability of the earth. But the real trick of this anthropomorphosis poetically, it seems to me, is the ability it gives Homer to depict an interaction between divine and human, that places us within the cosmos. It makes us players. I find it impossible to imagine in pictures the combat between a warrior and a god—what it would mean exactly for a warrior to attack a god. And yet Homer’s anthropomorphic or semi-anthropomorphic depiction somehow makes the combat plausible.
There is still something fantastic, designedly unimaginable about these episodes. What is it to hold converse with a river one is attacking, for example? What sort of portent is Athena’s tasseled aegis? And what exactly does Patroclus experience when Apollo strikes him in the back with the flat of his hand? What is this ‘flat’ of the hand? Is it the feeling of a spank, or a bully’s playground shove? These moments challenge the imagination, but there is no question that this challenge is a part of a poetic effect that is wondrous and unforgettable.
If Aphrodite is a goddess who governs both gods and men—recall the seduction of Zeus by Hera, that almost alters the course of the war—then there is not a difference in kind between the discharges among the planets (Apollo’s arrows, Zeus’ thunderbolts), and the erotic pangs we feel in the heart and loins. The love of Paris for Helen is the function of a cosmic physics. Helen and Aphrodite can be depicted in conversation: you sleep with him! says Helen to the goddess. Is Helen a free agent or not? Homer does not answer this question, but his depiction of the conversation somehow poses the question in an extraordinary way. You can see this if you consider how much would have been lost if Helen had merely delivered a tortured soliloquy before sleeping with Paris.
This goes also for the scenes with Achilles, when he is talking to his mother Thetis (how vividly he comes across as a Mamma’s boy), or when Athena pulls him by the hair, unseen by anyone else, to prevent him killing his king. It is possible to interpret these scenes as a kind of extroverted psychology, a way of dramatising an inner conversation, but think how much would be lost if the god was not there. I am tempted to say again, that an aesthetic motive leads to a kind of truth-telling about our condition. Aphrodite is real, is she not? Think how differently one would respond to a personification of Eros or Lust (what, do you suppose, would these things look like?); or to a mere explanation, moral, psychological, or chemical, in terms of desire and hormones?
When it comes to visualizing the gods, Homer seems capable of a sense of humour. Consider these lines from the shield in XVIII:
… ἦρχε δ᾽ ἄρά σφιν Ἄρης καὶ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη
ἄμφω χρυσείω, χρύσεια δὲ εἵματα ἕσθην,
καλὼ καὶ μεγάλω σὺν τεύχεσιν, ὥς τε θεώ περ
ἀμφὶς ἀριζήλω: λαοὶ δ᾽ ὑπολίζονες ἦσαν. (516-19)
… and Ares and Pallas Athena led them
the pair of them golden, golden were the clothes they wore,
beautiful and huge in their armour—like a pair of gods after all!—
conspicuous on both sides; while the hosts beneath were smaller.
It is somewhat whimsical of Homer to say that these planet gods were bigger in the picture, because—well—they’re gods! The variety and fineness in his depictions would seem to offset this kind of whimsy. Think of the scene at the end of Book I for example, with the gods in assembly, and things about to get violent. Hera has seen Thetis slipping into Zeus’s room, and she as a long-suffering wife has a thing or two to say about it. The tension is diffused by Hephaestus limping around with the wine; the gods dissolve into a (presumably) nervous chuckle at his expense. What a sense of being ‘behind the scenes’ is created here. Socrates selects this scene as one to be prohibited from his ideal city [see Plato’s Republic 388e-389a]. What sort of world does this divine laughter seem to connote? Why does Socrates object?
The Book of Job also creates this feeling of being behind the scenes in its opening frame, where the angels gather around God, and among them Satan the prosecutor, who goes to and fro on the earth. In that case the presence and voice of Job in the poem becomes so overwhelming, however, that when God suddenly reappears as a voice in a whirlwind, it seems like an epiphany. But the behind-the-scenes in Homer also has an upstairs-downstairs effect: when Iris visits Hephaestus and Charis to request the new armour for Achilles, or Hermes visits Calypso in the Odyssey, you get a glimpse into the lives and mores of middle-class gods. And there are the moments of sheer visual presence: a messenger flying from here to there on winged sandals, or white-armed Athena slipping out of her clothes before she dons her fearsome weaponry. The variety of Homer’s representation of the numinous can be stunning. It is therefore a playful Homer who says, commenting on a work of art as he describes it, that the gods have to be big, and the people smaller—because of course, they’re gods.
We return again to Homer’s aesthetic sensibility, the imaginative variety in his depiction of the various non-human and often invisible presences and forces at play in human events. This aesthetic power is still transparent to us. What is less transparent is the religious power, the religious authority of the Homeric poems in the development of an ancient Greek culture Homer never knew. The magnitude of the artist’s poetic and musical gift was, in Greek culture, all one with this authority.
James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975, xiii.
"The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strewn with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."